In My Head Blood Colored Rain Falls Down
by Damion Starr
Summary: Insanity can be seductive... A m/m slash fic. Don't like, please don't read. Contains spoilers for the ending.


In My Head (Blood-colored Rain Falls Down...)

Dr Lester Sheehan wasn't sure what was worse; the clear evidence of the insanity that was eating away at the brain of a man he'd come to consider a friend (which said much about his sorry state of affairs, that a patient had become a friend), or those moments of clarity where Andrew Laeddis looked at him with such betrayal and hurt in his eyes that the psychiatrist wanted to sink into the floor and simply cease to be. More than once Lester had found himself near tears trying to explain, to make Andrew understand that he had done it all; organizing the game, going along with the story, all of it, for him. He'd done it because he cared, and he wanted to protect the former Federal Marshal. But so often his desperate honesty, his pleading for forgiveness, was met with the same betrayed look, and Lester would leave the room before breaking down in his office.

Once, however, out of the blue, Andrew had looked at him, same betrayal in his pale eyes, and said: "Was any of it true?"

And Lester was cold. And wet. And being pressed down onto a stone slab by the same man he'd been treating for the last two years. But this man wasn't Andrew Laeddis. No, in this world he was Teddy Daniels, a Federal Marshal, whose wife had died in a fire, and they'd just met a few days ago, but already his trusted his new partner, Chuck Aule, though he didn't know why, and he was kissing this man like he was drowning and Chuck was oxygen.

But Chuck was still Dr Lester Sheehan, a psychiatrist with Ashecliffe Hospital for the Criminally Insane, and the closest he'd come to the War was treating soldiers, one of whom had snapped, brought a field knife to his office and stabbed Lester through the side like he was trying to gut him. Lester had laid on the floor while three other patients, all soldiers, subdued the man and another, a former army medic who'd seen a child blown up before his eyes, pressed his hands against the wound and murmured "Please stop bleeding, please stop bleeding". But that was years ago and miles away, and now Lester was going by the name Chuck, calling Andrew 'Teddy', and kissing his male patient back, because he was drowning, in guilt, in regret, in all the coulda, woulda, shouldas, and Andrew was the only one who could pull his head above water.

Andrew (no, Teddy, call him Teddy) tasted like cigarette smoke, and rain, and strength, and insanity. Lester, for the first time in all his years as a psychiatrist, wanted nothing more than to give into that. To simply sink into the depths of insanity and away from a world were there was violence and war and haunted soldiers and kids exploding; a world where he was a trusted doctor leading a patient, a friend, through a fantasy because his wife had been sick and he hadn't seen it until she drowned their kids. He wanted, with every fiber of his being, to be Federal Marshal Chuck Aule, Teddy Daniel's trusted partner and friend and something else that Lester didn't want to think about but found he couldn't put out of his head.

Lester wanted to be Chuck, because Chuck was a better man than he could ever be.

Now they were months away from that mausoleum in the middle of a hurricane, and Andrew was still looking at him with betrayal, and Lester wanted to die.

'Was any of it true?'

Lester felt the word "no" press against the back of his tongue, because that was safer. Tell him 'no', and he'll forget all about that time they spent and go back to his world. But he couldn't say it. Maybe because Lester had been playing it safe his whole life and it had gotten him nowhere. Yes, he was a doctor, but he was also the laughingstock of the world of psychiatry and his only true friend, the only person he'd ever truely been honest with, was a lunatic.

Or maybe it was because Lester had already told Andrew too many lies, and he just couldn't take another.

So he took a breath, said 'yes' and waited.

A light went on in Andrew's eyes, one that Lester recognized. That light of clarity, the sign that Andrew was with him in the real world, and Lester had never seen it burn brighter.


End file.
